The effect isn’t unlike nostalgia, a longing for when humour appealed to our childish side, uncomplicated and universal; it is the easiest way to plaster a smile across your face for 100 minutes. You are unlikely to find a funnier or more inventive film this year.
FALLING INTO PLACE echoes Sally Rooney’s Normal People: it follows two young lovers who come in and out of each other’s lives while trying to come to terms with the heartbreaking hands they have been dealt.
THE DEAD DON’T HURT is a clear labour of love and a throwback to an earlier era of Western, for better and worse. Carmen Paddock reviews.
If this franchise has its Romulus in Ridley Scott, and ALIEN is his Rome, Fede Alvarez’s ALIEN: ROMULUS is the fall of the Roman Empire: a scattered jumble of icons and monuments faintly echoing a triumphant past.
George Jaques’s BLACK DOG shows a lack of confidence in storytelling, but his next film can be great should the choices be bolder and more confident.
Audacious in the extreme, THE BEAST delivers nothing new on each of its premises, but its combination is bold and stylish. The film does not rise above its shock value in commenting on society, but Seydoux and Mackay are in magnificent form.
Its odd tempo and mythic resonances make LA CHIMERA feel like a half-remembered story that you first heard years ago. The film’s surprising richness will bury itself in your mind in a way that finds you stumbling across it afterwards.
In Rose Glass’s new feature, LOVE LIES BLEEDING, bodies are vessels that can barely contain what they feel inside. Something is always trying to burst out. Put simply, LOVE LIES BLEEDING rips.
A frog-in-a-kettle study of a societal microcosm under pressure, THE TEACHER’S LOUNGE leaves audiences turning over possible truths and futures for its characters long after the credits roll.
YANNICK playfully imagines a complete breakdown of the relationship between artist and paying punter. It offers no solutions and barely contains an ending, but maybe in all of its madness, there is a quiet plea for any critical displeasure to be saved for our social media feeds.
